


No Tongue, No Teeth

by ckret2



Series: Red Sprite & the Golden Ones (Rodorah slowburn oneshots) [20]
Category: Godzilla (2014), Godzilla - All Media Types, Godzilla: King of The Monsters (2019)
Genre: Boundaries, Canon-Typical Violence, Fluff, Kaiju Linguistics, Language Barrier, Languages and Linguistics, M/M, New Relationship, POV Outsider, combat is their #1 shared hobby, it's fluffy violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-26
Updated: 2019-12-26
Packaged: 2021-02-26 21:27:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21975643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ckret2/pseuds/ckret2
Summary: If Rodan and Ghidorah are supposed to be courting each other, then it’s high time that Rodan explain to this big clueless alien what exactly that means on Earth.And meanwhile, the Monarch scientists responsible for translating titan language are driving themselves crazy trying to figure out what the hell Rodan and Ghidorah are talking about.
Relationships: King Ghidorah/Rodan
Series: Red Sprite & the Golden Ones (Rodorah slowburn oneshots) [20]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1476800
Comments: 15
Kudos: 144





	No Tongue, No Teeth

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted Sept 20. This is part of an ongoing series of Rodorah one-shots. If you don’t want to read the others, all you need to know is: Ghidorah doesn’t speak any Earth languages so Rodan’s teaching them, and at this point they’re making an A in “creative uses for limited vocabulary” but a C+ in grammar; and Rodan’s never heard the word “Rodan” before and considers himself Nido.

"Look at them." Xochitl pressed her fingertip to a screen displaying a live feed from one of the many cameras Monarch had trained on the volcano. It was barely past dawn, with reddish sunbeams breaking weakly through patchy morning rainclouds—it had been raining since Rodan and Ghidorah had come home yesterday—and the two titans were sitting together in a narrow valley between the eastern side of _el Nido del Demonio_ volcano and the neighboring hill. Rodan was chattering steadily to Ghidorah, pausing to shake off the morning drizzle every once in a while, and Ghidorah only occasionally cut in with questions or requests for clarification. "They've never been this chatty. Or this... this _incomprehensible_. It's like they're speaking a completely different language."

Arturo decided not to point out to her that they were.

"I can't _believe_ it." Xochitl propped her elbows on her wobbly desk and planted her face in her hands. " _Days_ they spend in the Antarctic circle. And when they come back, I can't understand a _thing_ they're saying."

Arturo patted her shoulder sympathetically. This had the effect of causing her to crumple down to the desk, hiding her face in her arms in despair.

Dr. Xochitl Flores Rosales was the primary mind behind “ _lenguaje de los pájaros titánicos (para principiantes)_ ,” the YouTube channel produced by Outpost 56-B—which consisted of a trio of trailers at the edge of the volcanic rock on the outskirts of Rodan's territory. For weeks now, she and the rest of 56-B had been studiously recording every single squawk and trill that came out of Rodan and Ghidorah's mouths as Rodan painstakingly—and with copious easy-to-follow pantomime—taught Ghidorah his language. She'd been stitching videos together out of footage they were taking of the titans from dozens of different angles, editing and subtitling every word between them, and then releasing the videos to the public. (To the consternation of Monarch HQ, who hadn't approved a project utilizing footage that they thought of as Monarch property.)

Until now several days ago, Outpost 56-B _had_ been riding high, buoyed by the explosive popularity of their real-time language lessons and their Monarch-unauthorized Twitter account documenting the odd-but-oddly-harmless day-to-day activities of Isla de Mara's two resident titans. Even the false alarm from several days ago had ended happily: after a long night spent sending very serious updates to the official Monarch HQ Twitter account about the unexpected skirmish between Rodan and Ghidorah, the resulting hurricane-wreathed chase scene through the Atlantic down to Antarctica, and the subsequent far more vicious fight, it had been a relief to receive pictures from the Antarctic Outpost 32-B skeleton crew showing Rodan and Ghidorah cuddling up against each other like nothing had happened. 56-B had promptly added an impressive array of heart emojis to the pictures, added a caption celebrating that the lovers' spat hadn't ended in an apocalypse, and posted it to their very unofficial Monarch Outpost 56-B Twitter account.

(Monarch HQ, again, asked them not to refer to Rodan and Ghidorah as a romantic couple, even as a running joke for their Twitter audience, due to the fact that they had _no idea_ what was really going on between Isla de Mara's two titans; and until they saw evidence that the titans were actually some sort of mating pair, 56-B was deeply abusing the reputation of scientific authority that came from the name "Monarch" by referring to them like they were. 56-B responded by pointing out that half the times Godzilla was mentioned on the official Monarch Twitter account, Dr. Russell's totally unproven "alpha" label was still getting flung around, despite the fact that last week Godzilla had sat on a beach for six hours trying to untangle a fishing net from his dorsal plates while Kraken occasionally snuck up behind him to re-tangle the net.)

No apocalypse had happened. 56-B's personal favorite soap opera couple had come back from the brink of a breakup, gone on a cruise together, and literally cuddled for warmth. Rodan, newly-adopted pride of Tamaulipas, had done what no other titan had done thus far by defeating Ghidorah in single combat. And now they'd come back to Rodan's nest with naught but a light summer rain to disturb the weather. This should have been a happy homecoming.

But while the two titans in question had spent the last few days fighting/chilling in Antartica, riding on a supercarrier, and setting off a goddamn volcano on Bouvet Island, the 32-B skeleton crew had sent absolutely useless videos that didn't help the 56-B crew understand a single thing Rodan and Ghidorah were saying. They'd barely managed to pick out a couple of new words when the wind was right. Xochitl had spent several hours straight furiously rewatching footage from a Monarch observation ship, palms pressing her headphones to her head, volume turned up to maximum, staring at her laptop with her eyes two inches from the screen, trying desperately to lipread two creatures that didn't have lips to read as Rodan dropped rocks one after another in front of Ghidorah and _she knew he was teaching him to count, dammit! She KNEW he was! And she couldn't hear the numbers!_

If the U.S. Navy didn't turn over the footage they'd recorded while Ghidorah had been lounging on their supercarrier, she was taking a rowboat to Washington D.C. and challenging Admiral Stenz to a fistfight.

So here Xochitl was. On the verge of pulling out her hair because she no longer understood a damn thing coming out of their mouths. This was sobering news for “ _lenguaje de los pájaros titánicos (para principiantes)._ ”

"Rodan's even changed the name he's calling Ghidorah," she grumbled. "Just slightly. But you can hear the difference if you compare recordings. What does it _mean?_ "

"Maybe it's a rank thing?" Arturo suggested. "Since he beat him in a fight?"

"Shut up. That's what Russell would say." She sighed heavily, propped her chin on the desk, and put her headphones back on. "Okay. Shit. I'm _going_ to figure out what they're talking about if it kills me."

"Good luck," Arturo said solemnly.

"At least Rodan's explaining new words again," Xochitl muttered. "He's usually easier to understand when he's explaining new words. Damn."

"What's he teaching now?" Arturo asked.

"Body parts," Xochitl said. She watched dully, copied the way Rodan stuck out his tongue, and frowned. "I think he's telling Ghidorah not to lick him?"

Arturo considered that. "Okay," he said. "That's reasonable. I wouldn't want Ghidorah to lick me either."

###

"Chest," Nido said, puffing his chest out demonstratively—and inadvertently showing off the newest golden face print that the golden ones had left on him. (It was a fabulous bit of decoration, he thought.) The golden ones dutifully echoed the new word. "Back." He turned. "Wings," spread wide. "Tail," wiggled.

"Small tail," the golden ones' left head added unhelpfully.

Nido gave him an exasperated look—well, they couldn't _all_ have a million miles of spines hanging off their asses, could they?—but grudgingly conceded, "Small tail." He turned back around, wiggled his feet, then his hands, "Talons. Claws."

They repeated the new words, then waited attentively for whatever he said next.

"No touching," Nido said.

Their tails drooped.

"Touching is after courting," Nido said. "Do you understand?"

"Yes," they said. _One_ of the voices in that chorus sounded gloomy. 

"Before courting: head and neck." He kicked a couple of rocks at the appropriate anatomy on the golden ones, since compared to them he didn't have much to speak of in the way of a neck. "Touching head and neck is okay. Not body."

"Is body touches head okay?"

Nido thought about that. He'd never considered that arrangement before. He tried to imagine a wing rubbing his head, and said, "No. Not okay."

"Is head touches body?"

Technically, in proper courting, that was a no-no too. But he was really getting to like the way that they left golden imprints in his armor when they pressed into him just after he emerged from a lava bath, and he didn't want to say no to _that._ "Sssometimes."

"What is 'sometimes'?"

"Between yes and no?" Nido tried.

The golden ones gave him a collection of perplexed/affronted looks. " _'Maybe'_ is between yes and no," the right one reminded him.

With a careful mask of mildly curious indifference, the middle one asked, "'Sometimes' is between maybe and yes?"

"Is 'probably,'" the left one supplied, and then dodged as the middle one snapped halfheartedly at his horns.

"No, no, uh..." Nido tried to think of another way to illustrate the word to them. "Sometimes, the sky is raining; sometimes, the sky is sunny."

"'Sunny'?"

"Sunny! You know 'sun'. Sunny is 'the sun is here.'"

The golden ones considered that, then made a satisfied noise.

They weren't supposed to be talking about the weather. Nido tried to remember what the original question had been.

Right! Boundaries! "And no tongue," he stuck his out demonstratively, "and no teeth." He didn't really have teeth to demonstrate that with, so he clacked his beak a couple of times and hoped they'd figure it out from context.

"After courting?"

"No! Not before _or_ after. No tongue, no teeth."

Middle and right immediately looked at left head. Lefty reared up, looked at Nido with the deepest of offense, and said, "Tongue _tastes_ you."

Nido hopped up to the golden ones, made deep, soulful eye contact with each of them, and said, calmly but passionately, "I want you to not taste me."

Lefty made a displeased noise.

"Do you understand?"

They considered the question. "What is 'want'?" the right one asked. The other two, sensing an opportunity, immediately piped up: "What is 'not'?" "What 'taste'?"

Oh, they were comedians now. He fluttered up, brandishing his talons at their faces. They backed off with only one stray snap at his feet, making a rumbling noise low in their throats that was _probably_ either a death threat or a sound of amusement. Nido was going to take his chances that it was the latter.

He landed a bit up his nest's slope. "No tongue, no teeth," he repeated. Then, considering what little he instinctively knew about mating, amended himself: " _Maybe_ teeth, after courting. _Sometimes._ No tongue. Do you understand?"

"Yes!"

"Good!" So there was one topic covered. What next?

They'd been up since long before dawn discussing courtship—which Nido had attempted to convey to the golden ones was the process of getting from "maybe love later" to "yes love now"—and, specifically, all the rules and rituals that went with courtship; and since Nido was the winner of the most recent fight to determine whether they were going to continue courting, that made Nido the one in charge of deciding the exact way they were going to handle this.

He'd like to think the rules he'd laid down so far weren't tyrannical. Some people, he knew, went into courtship with a list of rigid standards and demands that they required any prospective partners to meet. Nido wasn't interested in any of that. He'd always thought that, when there was finally someone else around to court, he'd let his suitor do whatever they wanted to demonstrate what kind of mate they would be. It made more sense to him than commanding them to fit into Nido's preconceived notions. If he'd been sticking to some list of standards he'd developed without having ever courted before, would he be entertaining a courtship from a three-headed gold-plated alien? No, he would not, and his life would be poorer for it. Preconceived notions could get stuffed. Nido was going to be lax about the rules.

He just needed to be sure that the golden ones weren't going to, like, make him feel like they were about to eat him. He figured that was a very reasonable baseline level of trust for any healthy relationship.

They'd started with nests. It was normal to hang out at the reigning champion's nest, and honestly kinda weird to hang out at the loser's nest; but considering that the golden ones didn't _have_ a nest, Nido was going to say it was understandable that they'd been hanging out at Nido's instead. And now that he'd won their most recent fight, it actually made sense for them to hang out at Nido's place. If the golden ones wanted to choose their own nest and then won a fight, then Nido would be expected to visit their place.

(He didn't _tell_ them that they shouldn't choose an Antarctic volcano for their nest—he did, after all, want to see what they were actually like, not demand that they change their behavior to impress him. But privately, he thought that if they _did_ choose one in Antarctica, that was going to be a pretty strong indicator that they were going to have irreconcilable differences.)

And they'd covered fights. They could each challenge the other to a fight at any time. The most recent loser had the right to turn down challenges; but the reigning champion did not. ( _Some_ people considered accepting a challenge mandatory no matter what. While Nido thought that in an ideal world, everyone ought to be ready to throw down at all times, he had made enough friends who _didn't_ like fighting to recognize the value of allowing people the option to say no. But he thought a current winner really had no excuse to refuse a challenge to their position.) Fights were called when one combatant hit the ground, yielded, or fled.

Because the current winner was the combatant who'd recently proven to be the more impressive potential partner, they were therefore the one who needed to _be_ impressed by the other combatant. Consequently, the winner had the right to issue (non-combat) challenges to the current loser and to set the terms of courtship. The winner also got to lead the loser around if they decided to go out on any flights together, and—of course—they hung out at the winner's nest. Now, the loser didn't _have_ to get dragged out on any flights if they didn't want to go. They were allowed to turn down requests to go out. But most didn't because usually, if the loser was courting the winner, it was because they actually wanted to spend time with the winner, right?

And now, after a quick lesson on words for body parts, they'd covered physical boundaries—which would hopefully prevent the golden ones from coiling around him like a hungry sea serpent as a sign of affection again—so what was next? They'd hit the most important topics, Nido felt. At this point he didn't really have any _rules_ , per de. But maybe the golden ones would appreciate an overview of the kinds of things that normally came up during courting? Since Nido had no idea what kind of alien frame of reference they were coming from? He could touch on common things like dancing, offering gifts, kidnapping and murdering each other's enemies, and appropriate grooming behavior. Or maybe he should call it a morning and let them figure out their own way. Not that he wanted to leave them completely floundering—

"Is fighting touches body okay?"

Oh, they had another question. "Fighting is different."

"What is 'different'?"

Nido opened his beak, realized he had no idea how to concisely explain the idea of "different" with the words they had available, and decided to skip that question for now. "Yes, touching during fighting is okay—"

"We challenge winner."

"What?"

With a squawk, Nido was tackled by a hundred forty thousand tons of static-charged gold.

He wildly slashed his talons at their abdomen until they rolled off of him, cackling madly all the while.

Oh, he liked them.

He liked them a lot.

They'd barely gotten back on their feet and wings before he launched himself straight at them, claws aimed for their throats.

###

Arturo had been put in charge of both the camera feeds monitoring the tussling titans and the big red "call the Armada de México for help" button while Xochitl pored over the mountain of footage they'd collected that morning, listening to sentences over and over as she picked out new words and phrases.

"Any luck?" Arturo asked.

"Mmr," Xochitl said distractedly.

He gave her a moment. Then he tried again: "Any luck figuring out what they're doing?"

"What?" Xochitl finally looked over at Arturo.

He gestured at the camera feeds. "Is this just a little argument, or should—" He was interrupted by a fractured bolt of lightning lancing down the side of the volcano and a crack of thunder that rattled their furniture. "Should we be calling for help?"

"Oh. Yeah, no, no they're fine. Don't worry about them."

"You're _sure?_ "

"Yeah." She tapped a finger on her headphones. "They're playing."

"Oh." Arturo paused. He looked back at the camera feeds. Ghidorah had one set of teeth latched into Rodan's shoulder while Rodan tried to claw through his chest. Arturo looked at Xochitl again. "Sorry, what?"

"It's a—I think it's a ritual? Rodan's started using way more complicated grammar—the winner gets, uh... social benefits. Picking date night destinations and the like."

" _Oh._ " Arturo looked at the camera feeds again. In his opinion, anyone who fought like that over a date night ought to be well past breaking up and on to filing for a restraining order, but— "Hold on. 'Date night'? Like joking-around-on-Twitter 'date night,' or like _actually_...?"

"They keep using a handful of words they obviously worked out when we weren't recording that I haven't _definitively_ translated yet," Xochitl said, "and—they're discussing some kind of social rules—Rodan defined the word for whatever this rule system is using one of the words we don't have. But, from the context, the _most reasonable_ translation that fits that context is that he's laying down dating rules."

Arturo's jaw dropped. "You're _serious?_ So that's—" the island rumbled as somebody got knocked over, " _that's_ actual titan dating?"

Xochitl tipped back her chair, arms crossed triumphantly. "Dr. Rodan-fought-Ghidorah-to-steal-his-'rival-alpha'-title Russell can suck my entire ass."

A particularly heavy thud knocked over Xochitl's chair. " _Shit_."

###

Nido was pretty sure that the golden ones' faces just weren't built to properly make shit-eating grins. Nevertheless, as Nido flopped back first into his volcano and let the lava ooze soothingly into his new bite wounds, he could feel them exuding the _aura_ of a shit-eating grin. "What."

"We win."

" _No!_ " Nido flailed back upright. "You do not!"

" _Do,_ " they insisted. "We fight. You fall. We are winner." They took turns with the sentences—which made their accent much thicker than when they traded off with the syllables each was best at pronouncing, but incalculably increased their smugness.

"Not a fight!"

Some of their smugness dissipated as they gave him a wary look. "What?"

"A fight _in the sky_ is a fight! A fight on the _ground_ —" he dismissively flicked a chunk of rubble from the hive the humans had built over the top of his crater, sending it bouncing and clattering down the side of the volcano, "is _not_ a fight. You're not a winner if you don't _win_." With the last word, he raised his wings, pantomiming flying, reminding the golden ones that that was the other definition of the word: _you're not a winner if you don't fly_.

"You—! You are—!" The golden ones stopped there, apparently unable to conjure up a word that illustrated exactly what they thought of Nido. They were making that low, deep, rumbling noise that he'd determined was either a threat or a laugh. 

"Cheater?" he offered them gleefully. "Liar? Fraud? Hustler?"

They climbed to the edge of the crater, loomed over Nido, and venomously hissed, " _Insult._ "

Nido flopped back and cackled until he choked on his own lava.

They leaned over the crater and bunted his forehead so hard he momentarily saw stars. Now he was sure: they were laughing.

Somewhere southward, a couple of scientists at 56-B were adding a viciously cutesy photo filter to a shot of the bunt and posting it to Twitter.

**Author's Note:**

> Original post available on [tumblr](https://ckret2.tumblr.com/post/187852958197/no-tongue-no-teeth). Comments/reblogs there are very welcome (as are comments here)!


End file.
